By Alexander Frank, IBM Germany
Owner of a fast sports car and not living in Germany? Unless you have your own raceway, you will never harvest all of your cars power because of speed limits. Technically, the engine can do more, but other components like street speed limits prevent you to do so.
Similar to this, CPUs of modern servers are capable of high performance computing, but often held down by read/write speeds of storage devices. PCIe SSD adapters have improved this, but still have a write latency of 15 μs which is not... [Continue Reading]

When it comes down to selecting the x86 server platform for your applications and services, you first think about reliability – you need highly reliable system for your tasks and processes to run 24 hours per day, 7 days a week (24x7), without any downtime. And the question you might ask is: What are the most reliable x86 servers to fulfill your needs?
While there are many different ways to estimate server reliability and gather the required data to evaluate different offerings, one of the approaches is to look at the industry... [Continue Reading]

If you are looking for an enterprise-grade x86 server to run mission-critical database or virtualization applications, then look no further than IBM eX5 servers. Here are 5 things to know about them:
1. IBM eX5 systems are based on Intel Xeon E7 processors
The Xeon E7 processor family is Intel’s flagship processor product line, which is designed to maximize performance, scalability and reliability. They feature large cache sizes and large numbers of cores. Intel Xeon E7 processors offer enterprise grade reliability,... [Continue Reading]

An interesting question was recently raised by one of my colleagues. We know that the IBM eX5 servers with Intel Xeon processor E7 family provide advanced RAS capabilities (in addition to leading scalability and performance). We also know that the traditional dual-socket Intel Xeon processor-based servers offer standard RAS features. The question was what is the actual difference between standard and advanced RAS, and, more important, can advanced RAS features really help to achieve better availability and to what extent of so? In other words,... [Continue Reading]

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